Whether your political views fall on one side of the aisle or the other, one thing that most Americans can agree on is the fact that our current public educational situation is in a state of crisis. For decades, politicians have spent thousands of hours and billions of taxpayer dollars batting this issue back and forth with no real significant improvement to show for it. I’m no politician, but as someone who is a part of the public education system, I’d like to offer my insight on what is wrong with education in America.
Artificial Self Esteem
Let me be clear: kids need a healthy self esteem. The fact that teachers and administrators desire to nurture a student’s sense of confidence is not the problem — its the mode by which self esteem is delivered. Instead of showing kids how to develop self esteem through hard work, perseverance, and character, educators tend to have a genuine, but misguided drive to infuse all aspects of education with badges of artificial self-esteem. This issue has become so pervasive in public education that it can be found in just about every nook and cranny of the public school system.
The most alarming place I see this happening is on student report cards. I have known many teachers who will pad a student’s (or a whole class’) grade by intentionally giving a high point value to an educationally meaningless project. If the class’ Science grades are looking low, many teachers will think up some sort of art project that their kids can easily complete and the “A” grade for that mindless project will balance out the “F” she received on the chapter test earlier in the week.
Another similar practice is work modification. This is when teachers decide to require a smaller portion of the work from “low students” and grade their progress based on what they have done, not what the rest of the class is expected to complete. Basically, this means a low student can earn an “A” by completing only a portion of the work while a high kid might earn a “B” after being required to finish all of it. To me, grade modifications show a tremendous lack of compassion to the students who worked hard to learn and properly apply the information in the lesson.
Both of these practices cause what I call grade inflation. Grade inflation is harmful because both the student and his parents are kept in the dark about the child’s real academic ability in a subject area. They may think he is earning an average “C” when in reality he is failing to meet the curriculum requirements. Just because he can color a picture of a butterfly, doesn’t mean that he is able to describe its four life cycle stages. Grade inflation doesn’t help the student in the long run, it only masks deficiencies.
These things are typically done with a heart that says, “If I give Johnny the “F” he earned on his math test, he is going to feel bad about himself, and since I am supposed to be the one who boosts his self esteem, I’m going to give him a break so that he’ll feel like he accomplished more.”
Where is that in adult life, huh?
“Stanley, as your boss I feel it’s my duty to help you become more confident in your job, so even though you spend hours a day checking your Facebook account and going on smoke breaks, I’m only going to evaluate your performance based on the work you actually complete. I saw that you only filled out half of this expense report from last month. Boy, you sure did a good job on that half. Way to go! I know I ask my other employees to stay on task and earn their promotions through old-fashioned hard work, but I think you’ll have a better chance at becoming the company CEO one day if I require next to nothing from you.”
That mentality obviously does not work in the real world, so why on earth are we trying to pull this sort of thing on our kids?
Students know when they are being handed their self-esteem on a silver platter, and while that may produce some false sense of accomplishment for a short time, inevitably they have to come face to face again with the fact that they never actually earned anything of significance.
I have found that the best way to produce genuine self-confidence in students is to push them to overcome their roadblocks, not for us to pick them up and carry them around to the other side. Sure, being held to a high standard can be frustrating for students, but when a kid begins to work extra-hard and after time is finally able to accomplish something that has been dogging him for months, you can’t beat the confidence that comes from that experience.
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